Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan - 100 Queer Poems

VINTAGE

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
New Zealand | India | South Africa

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

First published by Vintage in 2022

Selection and editorial material copyright Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan 2022
visibility copyright Andrew McMillan 2022
Answer copyright Mary Jean Chan 2022

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Cover artwork: Knuckles on the equinox, 2021 Zoe Walsh

The Credits on constitute an extension of this copyright page

ISBN: 978-1-473-59623-8

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

When I was sixteen I came out to my dad; that evening he knocked lightly on my bedroom door and, when I called out hello, stepped into the room and said, I think you should read this. It was a copy of Thom Gunns Collected Poems, red and thick as a slab of meat, Gunns handsome face looking out from the cover. I fell in love. It wasnt that I saw myself in Gunn, or imagined living the life he did, it was that I saw for the first time that who I was might be worthy of poetry, worthy of literature.

*

The last time an anthology like this one came out from a trade publisher was almost four decades ago. Looking around at all the various poetries and range of voices we see being published now, and the twentieth-century voices theyre in conversation with, I began to wonder what a new anthology might look like; how the tectonic plates of the page might have shifted in the intervening years.

*

Language is important to focus on, I know. The word queer is still a contested space; for so long a slur, it has been reclaimed by large parts of the LGBTQ+ community, but still hurts some who remember the word hurled as a weapon towards them. For this anthology we contacted each (living) poet individually, where possible, to ensure theyd be happy being grouped under such a banner.

*

An anthology like this asks a necessary but difficult question: what is a queer poem? I wish I knew. The poems youre about to encounter are a hundred different ways we might arrive at an answer. Is a queer poem simply anything written by a poet who identifies themselves as queer? Is a queer poem one that is overtly queer in its subject matter? Is a queer poem one that queers the language, or the form, the very structure of what a poem is?

By including a poem in this anthology, are we shifting the way it, or its author, could be viewed? If some of these poems were included in an anthology of poems about mental health, or poems about freedom or loneliness, would that frame our reading of them? By looking at it through a queer lens, are we altering it? Is the version of the poem that exists in this anthology different from the one that existed before? This anthology is 100 Queer Poems, not 100 poems about queerness: what difference does that make?

*

And what of the poets? In amongst the newer names here are poets you may well be familiar with, they exist in the canon, that odd literary space which sometimes feels like an exclusive nightclub that has a dress-code nobody can describe, and a door policy that only exists through word-of-mouth. So often these are poets we know of despite their queerness, not because of it. Think of Langston Hughes, the poet of the Harlem Renaissance; think of John Ashbery of the New York School; think of Wilfred Owen, the war poet; think of W. H. Auden, the poet of a particular kind of Englishness. These are poets who often survive because there is another claim on their identity they can neatly fit into another school, another movement and therefore are palatable for being taught in classrooms, for being read at weddings or funerals, for being remembered. What becomes of these poets if we centre that part of their identity that is often overlooked?

*

And what of the effect on you, the reader why have you come here? Are you hoping for a glimpse into a life not your own (and isnt that perhaps what we ask of all literature?), or are you hoping to see something you might already have imagined? Perhaps you hope to use the poem almost as a window on a sunny day and see yourself refracted into the scene on the page. Perhaps youre looking for a sense of community. Perhaps youre striving towards a new language that might express who you are and how you can take yourself forward into the world. These are just some of the questions we were asking each other, and you might have better answers than us; more likely you have better questions you could ask.

*

This is an anthology that is arriving at a paradoxical time. The last half-decade has seen an explosion in new queer spaces for poetry: new magazines in which to publish; new and vital independent presses nurturing brilliant and disruptive talent; continued impetus from established publishers to celebrate and trust the work of queer poets; a new recognition and rediscovery of the queer poets of old. And yet what does this mean off the page, on the street, in day-to-day life? Hate crimes against queer people in the UK, for example, almost trebled in the five years that ended the 2010s (and these are just the incidents that were reported). There is a continuous, hideous and growing campaign of abuse and harassment towards the trans community, from politics, mainstream media and, sadly, within the queer community itself. Faced with this, what is it that poetry can do? On the one hand, nothing; and pretending poetry is the equivalent of legislative change and legal protection is false, and unhelpful. On the other hand, a communitys collective imagination of itself a reshaping and a remoulding of language, a subversion or altering of the everyday might be how we begin to partly save ourselves.

*

At the turn of the millennium, when I was eleven or twelve, and the world and my body were turning into an unknown era, our school, like countless others, put together a time-capsule to bury, so future generations might remember the technologies and petty distractions of a bygone age. Anthologies are time-capsules too; if Mary Jean and I came back in ten years and did this project over again, things would already look very different.

*

So often in poetry, saying what something isnt can contain much more depth and weight than saying what something is. If I look out of the window and say, Its not raining, thats very different from saying, Its sunny. In that spirit, here are a few things that this anthology isnt: its not a generational anthology therell be time for that in the future and its someone elses job. Its not an attempt at canon-building its just one more voice in an ongoing and flourishing conversation. Its not a destination, its simply the next stage of the journey. Could that journey, at points, have reached different destinations? Almost always. An anthology, then, is simply an accumulation of the possible.